I suppose it was enivitable but there hadn't been an rumours at all. This is great news, not only does it make an AppleTV appealing but actually usable.
Prices seem ok, not fantastic. But low enough to warrant even a test rental/purchase for even the most timid user. Apparently theres HD copies of some movies which cost $1 more, I can't find one yet. File sizes range from 0.8-1.2gb in the movies I looked at.
700 movies, Studios included off the bat
- 20th Century Fox
- The Walt Disney Studios
- Paramount Pictures
- Warner Bros
- Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (MGM)
- Sony Pictures Television International
- Lionsgate
Rentals (30day rental, 48hrs to Watch once you press play, play across all )
- New Release - $6.99
- Older Titles - $4.99
- New Releases - $24.99
- Older Titles - $9.99 - $17.99
The usual peev's -
No TV yet, which is sad but understandable. I hope this means that theres at least an infastructure for real video delivery and hopefully mean that TVNZ, TV3 etc.. can start deals with Apple.
Listings No way of finding movies by price or quality.
Bandwidth - So I pay $7 for a movie, and then need to pay for the gb of data also adding, say, $1 more to the price. More than a DVD.
DRM - Everyones favourite. Apple only - no Zune users.......
All in all though this is a really big day for NZ media distribution, as big as iTunes originally launching music sales in NZ. You can finally sit on your couch, click through a big list of Movies and click a button and be watching a rented/purchased movie in seconds (or minutes knowing NZ broadband). You can have the iphone to play it on finally, and make use of the gimmick of an ipod with video - just like most of the developed world. Exciting stuff - if only I had money on my credit card....... :)
Read MoreI think I have gone on about MythTV enough, what about the other major open source media center application, which has many of the features of myth and the added bonus of being Windows-based and hence a lot more familiar territory for most people?
I have run Mediaportal 1.0 for a couple of months now, it's currently at RC2 and has been pretty good. You may have noticed my HTPC system isn't exactly top of the line, a single core and 1GB of RAM means Vista doesn't run very smoothly. MP can be sluggish, I think the remote lag has been fixed, but often loading a channel and setting up a recording can be slow. The worst problems come when recording 2+ shows, especially if some are HD, and watching another at the same time. The show I'm watching will skip or pause, I don't think the hard drive is fully up to the task.
Now plenty of people of these forums already run Mediaportal but there also seem to be plenty running GB-PVR and MCE and to be honest I'm often not sure why. One obvious point is the use of Popcorn hours as a frontend for a GB-PVR server; they look like a sweet quiet, reliable client, but what you are missing out on is full support for all of Freeview HD's audio formats (and hence can watch all the channels), and support for recording multiple channels of a single digital frequency. This is something I do all the time, and to test out my system I once got it recording 5 shows at once, including the HD channels, and it worked fine. I'm sure it could do more, even an HD stream is only around 1.2MB/s, but I got bored. On top of that of course you have support for multiple sources (digital and analogue) and can hence have Prime and FreeviewHD on one system. Again, can't see why you would want to go for Vista MCE instead. Yes it is more stable but I fail to see why so many people have posted at The Green Button complaining about the delays, and possible cancellation, of H.264 support when there is a viable alternative avaliable right now.
This brings me to my point about Mediaportal, its flexibility and feature support, which come from its ability to lean on other software for support. MP doesn't have built-in H.264 decoding, it uses an external codec such as PowerCinema. MP doesn't need drivers for all the TV cards it supports, it uses the provided Windows drivers. And I don't know the technical details but MP also leans on various other parts of the operating system, such as Aero for video performance. This of course gives it a huge advantage over MythTV, which requires all these critical supporting components to be written by volunteers and included in the operating system. Hence, I use it :)
Finally I thought I might add to this blog with what I have been watching. I recently managed to add to my standard fare of The Daily Show and CSI/SVU etc with Friday Night Lights, 8.30pm Friday C4. Set in the heart of Texas; it is about football, God, cheerleaders and football. Very interesting insight into what these small towns revolve around, namely Friday night college football. You thought we take rugby seriously here, we have nothing on the Americans!
Read MoreI wasn't planning on doing more work on Twitula this soon (there are other more interesting things to work on in .NET land these days), but with Tech Ed '08 coming up soon I thought it would be handy to be able to filter tweets by the #tenz hashtag while I was there, and then since I was adding hashtags it wasn't much work to include word search as well.
As always, you can get it here.
If you have any problems just use the contact form and let me know.
(Clarification: You'll need to be more specific than "it doesn't work"
. Just thought I'd mention that). 
Read MoreI just had a call from a Mr Denis Hampton (retired, RNZAF) regarding an official petition he is organising with National Candidate for Wigram Marc Alexander.
To cut a long story short, for the development to proceed it is dependant on a regional plan change being approved by council (to change the "Special Usage Aviation" designation of the land parcel as I understand it), this change has not happened yet. No plan change, no development, it can't proceed without it.
The catch is that this change is scheduled for final approval voting at the council meeting on the 28th of August, so the petition needs to be signed sealed and delivered by the 21st to have any hope of delaying the decision, so time is short.
The petiton reads:
"We the undersigned, urge the council to defer the decision to approve any plan (inclusive of plan change 12) to subdivide Wigram Airfield for housing until such time as all interested parties have been fully consulted and briefed."
Mr Hampton has indicated he will be collecting signatures in the afternoons this week on the street outside the North Entrance to Hornby Mall (ie entrance opposite the Warehouse). He already has collected 150 signatures.
A PDF scan of the petition form is available here:
http://sirius.gogo.co.nz/Petition.pdf
for any Christchurch folks who want to collect some signatures and post back to the petitioners (no fax, no email - it's got to be on the snail's back for this one).
Mr Hampton also advised that there will be an opinion article in the Press this Wednesday which is being effectively "rushed to print" by The Press to get it in before the date and should be an interesting read.
Mr Hampton also sent me a press release and article which are of interest here, he points out that "[The Minister of Lands and Ngai Tahu] were very clear that [Wigram] would be kept primarily for aviation purposes."
You can read the release and article from 1997 here:
http://sirius.gogo.co.nz/Articles.pdf
Read MoreYou can finally find it - the Vodafone Vodem Stick is here.
With 7.2mbps HSDPA (where available) and 900MHz 3G coverage support included, it's a miniature device but more advanced than the Vodem.
Pricing for it seems to vary across pages though:
- $199/$99 for 1GB/3GB plan (respectively) on 24mths
- $99/FREE for 1GB/3GB plan (respectively) on 24mths
Read MoreVendors need to work together, says Sun's flash memory head Read More
Microsoft New Zealand has confirmed Amit Mital, General Manager Live Mesh and Developer Platform, as its keynote speaker for the Microsoft Tech Ed New Zealand 2008.From the page:[quote]Software-plus-Services is Microsoft's st... (more in the full post)
Read MoreBroad data collection policy attracts the attention of the Privacy Commissioner Read More
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